The popularity of home entertainment is ever increasing, and the demand for readily available content is greater than ever. Many of today's homes are equipped with multiple electronic entertainment devices for displaying audio, video, graphics, text, images, etc. from a variety of sources and formats. At the same time, personal computers have been gaining popularity as storage and playback devices for various media formats.
Most of the electronic entertainment devices have some form of remote control. However, as the number of devices goes up, managing multiple remote controls has become a challenge for most users who wish to get to the content they want easily and quickly. Universal remote controls are one solution to this problem. However, many of the existing remote controls are hard to use due to the numerous buttons designed to accomplish various special tasks. Some universal remote controls are more minimal in button design but requires the user to program specialized “macros” to accomplish different tasks. There are also attempts of universal remote control design with voice recognition, but so far the devices have the same problem of being hard to program and only have a limited set of functions.
Furthermore, existing universal remote controls operate within a limited range of the controlled devices. It is useful to allow the user to access certain devices when the user is away from where the device is located. For example, the user may wish to set his recording devices while away from home.
It is useful to consolidate the functions of various electronic entertainment devices and provide the user easy access to the contents, without having an additional remote control to a household already cluttered with them. It is also useful to provide more advanced functions to help the users manage their media contents. It is also desirable to overcome the range limitations of the existing universal remote controls to allow the user to access the devices remotely.